By Brian Gleason
Steven was five feet nine inches tall and about one hundred forty pounds, just having crossed into his thirties when I met him at the Gauntlet Bar back in 1980s Los Angeles. He smacked my ass when I leaned in for a pool shot, which I missed, but I made the crossing glance to see his trickster smile…

by Andrew Sarewitz
I had no gay role models growing up—not in life or literature, on TV or in movies, so I didn’t know what I was supposed to do…

by Jon King
Over the summer, I found a group of friends. None of them seemed to like each other much, but they were united in sleeping with me. I was a sure thing. If they asked me to sleep with them, the word no would not leave my mouth. This was my summer life: days as a cobbler, nights as a clubber…

By Chenoa Rai
A Black boy feeling like a woman and wanting to live as one: where was this acceptable? Definitely not in my world, and I didn’t have the language to properly express who I was. The only trans representation I had came from Jerry Springer, who did more to exploit trans women than to humanize them.

by Ty Bo Yule
I hadn’t planned on transitioning at Harvard. No one would choose to invite puberty to graduate school, but I probably wouldn’t have finished my degree if I hadn’t…

by Phil Tarley
In 1970, I met Michael Feigh in San Francisco and he quickly became my pimp. My English boyfriend introduced us when we were hippies living near Haight-Ashbury. I was nineteen…

by Terry Wolverton
It’s been said that a thing does not exist until you have a name for it. When I was growing up in Detroit in the ’60s, no one I knew was talking about lesbians…

by Walter Meyer
Suicide, rightly or wrongly, feels preventable. If I had listened better, been a better friend, maybe it wouldn’t have happened. Bill’s death by suicide haunted me so badly that I couldn’t bear to think about him without it causing days of depression.